Imagine if your day begins and ends with the hustle bustle of the platforms at Goregaon or the Jogeshwari, and ends with the rambles of Church Gate or Mahalakshmi, the effect refuses to leave your psyche for the rest of the day.

I am talking about how this train behavior manifests in people in the city at all other times of the day too.

Have you noticed how people get in and out of elevators in the city? Not much different from the ins and outs of the local trains. Push, shove..get ahead in the queue. Should you wait for people to disembark ..oops…get off the lift first? You may…on one side of the lift, very much like in the train..one side for entry and one side for exit. Here, in the lift, there is an invisible bar in between, to separate the two sets of passengers.

On a eight storey lift, how do you get off on your floor i.e. the third floor? Will an excuse me help when you reach your floor? No ways. The lift culture here dictates that, as the lift reaches the second floor, move yourself to the door. The person in front will never get off the lift and get on again, if it is not his destination. After all the train stops for barely 30 seconds. So be ready to jump out when it touches floor number three.

What if you bump into someone in your hurry to get out? No problem…have a tch tch or a you have no sense dialogue at the tip of your tongue..and keep walking. Sorries are best left forgotten.

In a lift crowded beyond capacity, how not to lose touch with your folks or the promotional offer guys for even 2 minutes of your travel time in the lift? Trust the handsfree. At any time, there will be atleast half a dozen people on the phone at the same time. Could they be talking to each other? ;-)) Quite possible. Damn the network if it doesn’t find space to work in the over crowded, beyond capacity lift. Network operators are probably cursed the most in the lifts and trains of Mumbai.

Worse are the women folk who wouldn’t mind emptying the contents of their hand bag, risk a few things falling down, to find that elusive mobile phone with an obnoxiously loud ring tone. It is music time for the other folks in the lift who are twiddling their thumbs…for they get to hear…pappu cant dance saala or the a jab se adayein hai…based on the season.

All is not lost..there is still some hope. Yet to see people reading the newspaper in the lift, column to column, like they manage to do in the 7.32 fast!